Why We Love “This is Us”

On the hit new NBC series “This is Us,” one of the star characters talked a reluctant colleague into spending the holidays with his family. Kevin, a washed-up sitcom actor seeking a comeback on the stage, tells the woman about his adopted black brother, about his obese twin sister who is trying to lose weight and maintain a relationship with another food addict, and about his mother who is married to his dead father’s best friend. He asked, “Don’t you want to see that up close?”

Turns out she did, and we do, too. The series, which traces and intertwines the lives of these three siblings with flashbacks to various periods in their childhoods and in the marriage of their parents, is a hit.

“This is Us” is by far the highest-performing new show of the year, dominating the ratings and the adult 18-40 demographic. Adweek reported that the show has the most social media activity of any new show, broadcast network or cable. Why does this show seem to have a drawing power other family dramas haven’t?

Part of the success might be, of course, the brilliantly crisp writing and the acting range — especially that of Mandy Moore and Milo Ventimiglia, the show’s mom and dad. But writing and acting excellence don’t exactly explain television success in an era of real housewives and house-flipping reality shows. Nor does the spectacle Kevin alluded to at Thanksgiving explain it.

After all, how odd is this family compared to what else is on television — teenage werewolves fighting ghost riders, and an accidental president after everyone in the White House and Congress is killed in a terrorist attack?

The secret to “This is Us” is less about ogling some other, strange, dysfunctional family as it is about seeing in it our own.

This is where the time-hopping of the program is essential to its emotional power. Some of the adults in the show, like workaholic family man Randall, seem to have most things together, while others — like sister Kate scarfing down powdered doughnuts in her car at the gas station or brother Kevin losing his job after melting down on his brain dead sitcom — do not.

At the same time, though, we see them as children, and we see there’s not all that much distance between the two. We see a glimpse of the way the decisions made in private of a young couple who never planned to be parents reverberate through the years in the lives of their offspring.

This rings true because we all tend to see our lives as narrative and, like the characters in this series, the narrative is often murkier than we would like. Some of us had relatively idyllic childhoods. Some of us grew up in the specter of violence or addiction or abuse or some other awful reality. Some of us grew up wondering, as we do as we see some of the secrets of the backstories of this series unfold, whether the family figures of our past are heroes or villains or a mixture of the two.

The switching back and forth between the 1980s and 2016 reminds us that the narrative of our lives is not a straight line. Our childhoods aren’t just “back there,” but they intrude on our lives now, sometimes in picking at old scars and sometimes in reminding us of the small mercies that have brought us safe thus far.

We wouldn’t be who we are if not for the stories that have made us — stories we love, stories we hate, and sometimes stories we long to peer into but leave us in mystery.

After preaching the Gospel every day for 367 days straight throughout the 2016 presidential campaign season, Daniel Whyte III is preaching the Gospel for 1,000 days during the Trump presidency. If you think a new president being in office is the only thing needed to save America and 'make America great again,' you are woefully deceived. The church must follow through and "keep the main thing the main thing: and that is reaching unbelievers with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and praying for their salvation, for the problem in America is not only disobedient presidents, politicians, and people, but disobedient pastors, preachers, and parishioners who have refused to obey the Lord's Great Commission which is to, 'Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature,' and who have refused to obey God's repeated commands to 'pray without ceasing' for unbelievers, believers, and political leaders." So, we encourage you to pray for the new president, but not to get caught up in the political happenings like the world does. Nothing much is going to change until people get saved and get their hearts right with the Lord. And that is what this campaign is all about.

GLORY BE TO GOD! By the grace of God, over the past 40 years, Daniel Whyte III has preached the Gospel over 6,000 times to over 4 million people in over 25 countries personally, and nearly every country of the world online. In addition, Gospel Light Society International and GLM Omnimedia Group LLC have a network of over 1,000 Christian news sites which contain the preaching of the Gospel and Christian discipleship teaching in every country of the world and in every major city of the world. BCNN1 is a part of that network. Please click here to view some of those sites.